Work Text:
Tulip Jones does not like to fly. The dry air, the fiddly little packets of things crinkling in the seats around her, being sat that close to strangers for eight hours.
“Travelling for work?” asks the man in seat across the aisle, and he nods at Tulip's pressed pinstriped suit, his own shirt crumpled and his laptop open.
“No. Holiday.” Tulip says and picks up a book – because she can't do her work on a public flight, because “holiday” is much quicker to say than “meeting with a weapons engineer who refuses to deal digitally” - though actually, on that, when did she even last have a holiday?
Tulip Jones does not like to fly. When she lands in Montreal (a car waiting at arrivals, and she won't let the driver touch her suitcase) she takes a pause when the cold air hits her – and breathes. It almost feels worth it, the freshness and cleanness so different from London. It makes her think of mountains. Snowy mountains she's never seen, won't have time to see.
The car drives her on to her hotel in the city.
-
The first time she notices her, it's that visit in November when the city feels like it's gathering its nerve to get through another winter. Tulip always has the hotel room on the corner, first floor – likes to be able to see the streets around her – and there's a woman who sits in the window of her apartment over the road and reads, or does puzzles, at all hours.
One night, Tulip gets back late from a business meeting – 1am – and the woman is there, awake, reading, under a soft lamplight that stirs a long-lost warmth in her. Something wistful, something that doesn't belong in a city or a suit. When Tulip turns her own light on in the hotel room, the woman's eye is caught by the flash and she looks up – dazed at first, like she's still emerging from whatever world she was absorbed in – and then she smiles so disarmingly that Tulip's lips respond, match hers, without thinking.
The woman holds up her book, a few pages left, in explanation for her late night. Tulip doesn't have a palatable excuse for her own late night, but it doesn't seem to matter to the woman who turns back to her book with that smile still lingering, a loose strand of hair falling across her cheek.
-
The second time is in April, when a sudden snowfall has disrupted the promise of spring. Tulip's glasses steam up when she steps out of the hotel and she huffs in frustration (because, honestly, the amount of revolutionary tech she works with and yet this still is a thing?). Icy mountain air is whipping along the streets and when she stops on the pavement, she buttons her black peacoat up to her neck before she removes her glasses.
This is the second time: Tulip is polishing the lenses and replacing her glasses – there – with the window open, the curtains billowing – in the first-floor room across from hers, that same woman is leaning on the window ledge. She catches Tulip looking at her and grins again, as though those months in between, that long dragging winter, as though it never happened at all.
“You must be freezing!” Tulip calls up to her.
There's a sparkle in the woman's eyes, and when she calls back: “I am!” it's with such joy that Tulip remembers to look up, up –
The sky above them is the brightest blue, the few clouds blowing across so quickly they seem inconsequential. Tulip feels some tension – jetlag, maybe – slip from shoulders.
Her phone buzzes – meeting in ten minutes – and when she gets back that night, the lights across the street are off.
-
The third time is in August, and Tulip steps off the plane to an unexpected pang of regret that this will be her last trip for a while. It's just for a weekend, and her days are filled already – she's busy, absent, though that never seemed to matter before... But the window across from hers is empty again in the morning, just as it was when she went to bed, just as it was when she arrived from the airport.
The third time is not the last time, though at times it feels like might have been.
Tulip is returning to her hotel, this time opting to walk from the metro because the evening sun casts a glow across the city she's been missing. It's muscle memory, at this point, that turns Tulip's head automatically to glance up at that window as she nears the hotel – and it's empty again, though Tulip can see green plants thriving on the windowsill.
She's not sure what she wanted from this moment. She takes a pause and looks up at the evening sky, down the street to where the sun is setting behind the buildings – and searches herself for that place where the warm lamplight, clarifying cold wind, uncovered something that felt important. What was that again?
A tentative clearing of a throat behind her –
“I'm Agnes, by the way.” Agnes says and this time Tulip smiles first, caught, glad.
Agnes has a small suitcase by her side, coming home. Agnes has a small suitcase and a history in her eyes, in the way she holds herself, that Tulip knows so well. It's a look that Tulip knows in herself - like they might spend a lifetime together and still not know everything.
“I'm Tulip.”
“Tulip,” Agnes repeats it to herself. “That's such a nice name.”
Like they might spend a lifetime together, and still not know everything, and that might be okay.
“Would you like to come up, Tulip?”
The third time is not the last time.
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